20th-century Essayist Quotes

Salman Rushdie

William S. Burroughs

Herta Müller

Osip Mandelstam

Christa Wolf

Chuck Palahniuk

Arundhati Roy

It is amazing how nice people are to you when they know you are going away.

To the east, under the spreading sunrise, are more mesas, more canyons, league on league of red cliff and arid tablelands, extending through purple haze over the bulging curve of the planet to the ranges of Colorado — a sea of desert.

New York is a woman
holding, according to history,
a rag called liberty with one hand
and strangling the earth with the other.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

John Perry Barlow

The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.

Patient, dramatic, serious, genial,
From over to over the game goes on,
Weaving a pattern of hardy perennial,
Civilisation under the sun.

So many people in the Western World are just automatically made ill by any sort of frank writing about sexual matters.

William S. Burroughs

They say there is a difference between actual temperature and perceived temperature, but in the bearable heaviness of being the actual measure is no doubt the weight we perceive.

Fausto Cercignani

Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.

DeMaistre and Bonald … wanted to teach men submission, to give them the religion of established power, to substitute, in Bonald's phrase, the evidence of authority for the authority of evidence.

Alain Finkielkraut

I remember the time I said, 'I don't think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.'

Memories. form the building blocks of family history. They are the stories that survive in our kitchens and in our living rooms. Stories that tell it like it is about the way it was, the way it used to be. Some are humorous, others are painful, even embarrassing, but all of them make up the essence of African American history.

Henry Louis Gates

Quaking muscles in the act of birth,
Between her legs a pigmy face appear,
And the first murderer lay upon the earth.

I don't think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was.

Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

Randall Jarrell

From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.

Barbara Kingsolver

The age is rocking the wave
with human grief
to a golden beat, and an adder
is breathing in time with it in the grass.

Osip Mandelstam

Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises.

What I did was pour out about a gallon of Chanel Number Five and put a burning wedding invitation to it, and boom, I'm recycling.

Chuck Palahniuk

Conversation succeeds conversation, Until there's nothing left to talk about Except truth, the perennial monologue, And no talker to dispute it but itself.

Mao said he was prepared to have millions of Chinese people perish in a nuclear war as long as China survived... I'm beginning to find it more and more sick that only humans make it into our calculations... Annihilate life on earth, but save the nation... what's the subject heading? Stupidity or Insanity?

If somebody's trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.

There is no need to search for global solutions, apart from an absolute necessity to destroy the idea that such things exist.

John Ralston Saul

Lawyers love paper. They eat, sleep and dream paper. They turn paper into gold, and their files are colorful and their language neoclassical and calli-graphically bewigged.